Pierre Grimal (1912–1996)

Gorgeous. One of my favourite acquisitions of 2016.
Okay, I'm exaggerating - somewhat. This was put together in France in 1963, so does not reflect the last half-century of scholarship. Europe gets the bulk of the book, followed by East Asia, with smaller sections at the end for the New World and Africa. But, then again, I would expect an equivalent book published in, say, Kenya to be exactly the same in reverse, so how can I complain?

A wonderful book that discusses, in the introduction, the problems of prehistoric religions, and acknowledges that the vicissitudes of history also play their role in the critical lacunae of the Americas and Australia: literary cultures in Europe and East Asia simply left more complex details of their mythologies and - in some cases - simply had more (often needlessly) complex mythologies because of these generations of literate people.

Anyhow, this is an exquisite book on the subject, with each of the 546 pages packed with information. No extraneous chatter here, no attempts to fill out pages with anything less than research and thought-provoking discussion. And a decent bibliography rounds out the package.… (more)